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NGO Diplomacy

Overview

Over the past thirty years nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have played an increasingly influential role in international negotiations, particularly on environmental issues. NGO diplomacy has become, in the words of one organizer, an “international experiment in democratizing intergovernmental decision making.” But there has been little attempt to determine the conditions under which NGOs make a difference in either the process or the outcome of international negotiations. This book presents an analytic framework for the systematic and comparative study of NGO diplomacy in international environmental negotiations. Chapters by experts on international environmental policy apply this framework to assess the effect of NGO diplomacy on specific negotiations on environmental and sustainability issues. The proposed analytical framework offers researchers the tools with which to assess whether and how NGO diplomats affect negotiation processes, outcomes, or both, and through comparative analysis the book identifies factors that explain variation in NGO influence, including coordination of strategy, degree of access, institutional overlap, and alliances with key states. The empirical chapters use the framework to evaluate the degree of NGO influence on the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations on global climate change, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, negotiations within the International Whaling Commission that resulted in new management procedures and a ban on commercial whaling, and international negotiations on forests involving the United Nations, the International Tropical Timber Organization, and the World Trade Organization.ContributorsSteinar Andresen, Michele M. Betsill, Stanley W. Burgiel, Elisabeth Corell, David Humphreys, Tora Skodvin Michele M. Betsill is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State University. Elisabeth Corell, the Wallenberg Fellow in Environment and Sustainability at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs from 2001 to 2006, is currently an independent scholar.

About the Editors

Michele M. Betsill is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State University.

Elisabeth Corell, the Wallenberg Fellow in Environment and Sustainability at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs from 2001 to 2006, is currently an independent scholar.

Endorsements

“The chapters collected in this volume provide a rich set of cases and an important and original theoretical framework for studying the impacts of NGOs on international environmental politics. It should be widely read and assigned in courses on global environmental politics, social movements, international organizations, and politics. In particular, questions of actual NGO influence on international politics are critical to the fields this book addresses and have not yet been addressed by other works, especially to the degree of methodological rigor which this book attains.”
—Kate O'Neill, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley

“Without doubt, this book will become the new standard in efforts to explore the roles that NGOs play in international environmental negotiations.”
—Oran Young, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara